


Unforgive Me

by bubblesbythebeach



Series: Unobservable Phenomena [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Friendship, Guilt, His Last Vow, Infidelity, Many Happy Returns, Marriage, Post-Reichenbach, Romance, The Empty Hearse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-11 23:30:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1179233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bubblesbythebeach/pseuds/bubblesbythebeach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's taken years to get to this point but now it's New Year's Eve and Phillip Anderson is sitting on the sofa with his ex-wife drinking raspberry vodka. He'd be asking himself how his life had gotten so pathetic, if it weren't for Sara taking the next two hours to tell him <i>exactly</i>. What's. Wrong. With him.</p><p>At 12am when the Thames erupts into fireworks and greets 2014, the former Mrs Sara Singh-Anderson will take another shot and wipe her eyes.</p><p>At 2am she will cup his face in both hands and kiss him, and she will draw back and her pretty face will twist like she swallowed something sour, one rotten piece of fruit in a handful of pink, raspberry-flavoured memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 2010

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I should tell you 'Unforgive' is not a real word.  
> The result of  
> • liking Anderson as a character long before 'Many Happy Returns'  
> • loving 'Many Happy Returns'  
> • being so confused and indignant about his characterisation in 'The Empty Hearse' that we're going to pretend the skeleton-in-the-coat thing never happened

It starts when Sally Donovan reaches into the cupboard above the bathroom sink and takes out his deodorant. Shakes the black can, puts her finger on top of the nozzle, angles it at her sides before buttoning up her shirt. She doesn’t kiss him when she finds Phillip in the kitchen. Just smiles her beautiful, _beautiful_ smile with sparkly white teeth and bumps his hip, reaching past him to pick a mug from the dish rack.

“What do you want on your toast?” He could be offering her muesli, but that’s Sara’s organic stuff and the jar is tall, thin, and see-through. A quick breakfast would be about five inches’ worth.

“Got any butter instead of margarine?” Sally is bending at the waist in front of the fridge and indeed, she only notices the words _‘buttery taste’_ on the box she’s turning over. She can’t help making a face at it, tongue poking out between her teeth. She puts the margarine back and grabs the milk instead.

Phillip bites his lower lip before he says, “Shout you a muffin?”

Sally sips her milk – not bothered to make coffee now, and if they’re going to get breakfast on the run anyway, she might be able to get a free omelette out of him – and licks the line of white off her lip. “Sounds good. Ready when you are. Your hair’s a mess, by the way.”

Sally turns back to replace the milk carton and when Phillip sneaks up behind to pat her bum, she elbows him in the thigh and snickers. He’s not too fussed.

*

It’s five in the afternoon when the door rattles and something heavy thumps onto the floor on the other side. A susurrus of, “Come on, you buggering... work with me here...” carries through the door until it jerks open, a too-slow hand still trying to twist the key fully out of the lock. A worn black boot nudges the door all the way to the wall and steps back and forth over the threshold until a wheeled suitcase clatters into the hallway.

“Anyone home?” Sara drags her luggage behind her and ducks her head into the living room.

Phillip appears in the bedroom doorway, laptop under his arm. Goes up to her, throws the laptop onto the sofa, bends to tug the suitcase out of her grip. Gives her a kiss on the cheek. “Hey, stranger.”

Sara gives a little sigh and does a half-turn, sliding one arm around her husband’s waist and letting her head loll onto his chest. “Hmm, did you _clean_?” She laughs softly and swings up her other arm to point at the glass door leading to the balcony, clear and gleaming. The sun is starting to drop behind the buildings on the other side of the street, the undersides of the clouds dyed pink and orange.

“Oh, got bored without you around, needed to keep my hands busy.” Phillip slings an arm around Sara’s shoulders – he doesn’t have to overreach himself, she’s only just tall enough for him to kiss the side of her head. Her collar smells like sandalwood and vanilla. Well, the type from an aerosol can.

Sara squeezes his hand, starting to shake herself out of the embrace. “Trying to get into my good books, darling? Because I’m jetlagged—”

There’s a glint in his eye. “I, ah, did the shopping on Thursday.”

Sara laughs again and pushes at her husband’s shoulders before wandering into the kitchen. Phillip takes her suitcase and wheels it down the hall. She's thirsty and wonders if there's any pomegranate juice in the fridge left; there is, and the vegetable crisper is also full.

“Oh, my _hero_!” Sara calls out. “I was craving butter chicken, though. Want to get take-away?”


	2. 2011

“Ah, so there’s Sara and her suave Cambridge sweetheart!” The woman who flops into the chair next to Phillip is cocooned in leaf-green chiffon. She interlaces her fingers under her chin and leans across the table, leaving half a dozen thin gold bangles to tumble down her forearms. “You see that, Sara? Alliteration. Be proud.”

Phillip opens his mouth but it’s a false start. An apologetic expression is creeping over his face when Sara supplies, “Noreen.”

“Hullo,” she says.

“So sorry about that, Noreen,” Phillip says. For a second he wonders if he ought to shake her hand, but he’s still gripping his silverware. “Are you groom’s side or bride’s?”

“Second cousin of the bride. Don’t know why I didn’t spot you two before, they put you on a good table. I’m not stealing anyone’s seat, am I?” She shifts a little on the heavy fabric covering the chair.

On Phillip’s right, Sara lingers over a glass of water and jerks her head in his direction. “This one’s a slow eater,” she sighs.

Noreen reaches over suddenly to flick Sara’s shoulder with a varnished nail. “ _Saraaaaaa_ ,” she drawls. “We haven’t done lunch together in a gazillion years.”

Sara slaps the back of Noreen’s hand and laughs. “Saw you yesterday and this morning, you idiot!”

“But lunch! Cake! Drinks and dancing, woman! You’re not eating now, you’re just drinking that water like a snobby twit – come dance with me. Come along, Phillip.”

Sara offers him a little smile. “Let’s go?”

“Good,” Phillip says gravely. “Because if you don’t get me out of here I’m just going to keep eating samosas like a pig.” That draws another loud laugh from Noreen. Phillip takes one last sip of water and sweeps his dark hair off his forehead.

Just before she dives into the dance floor crowd Noreen looks over her shoulder and calls out to Sara, a teasing quirk to her lips, “Can he dance?”

Sara shakes her head hard, laughing. “Not at _all_!”

She, too, turns her head to take her husband’s hand. It’s warm inside the restaurant and he’s left his grey suit jacket on the back of his chair, along with a dirty plate and crumpled napkins. They are surrounded by uncles in suits and ties tapping their feet on the floorboards, looking here one moment and looking there another; their laughter is deafening. No one looks even close to getting tired and leaving.

Sara keeps his hand in hers (soft warm perfumed smaller than his) until the last minute, when she lifts her arms over her head and steps away from him. Sara picks the rhythm out over the chatter of the wedding reception and starts dancing between the other guests. She doesn’t close her eyes and lose herself in it; instead there’s a slight lifting of her brow and a fixed look on his face. Phillip isn’t sure what to do.

He steps closer and Sara seems pleased. She finally looks away, hips and arms moving constantly, and Phillip nearly gets a face-full of her hair. The disco ball spins circles of white light across Sara’s back, turning her blue sari into a river of swimming fish.

Behind him Noreen watches them and grins.

*

All Phillip wants to do is have a warm shower and take the weight off his feet. It feels like it’s going to be a deep, bones-set-in-concrete kind of sleep.

Sara is sitting on the corner of the mattress, legs crossed under her while she takes off her jewellery. Afterwards she kneads and pinches at her aching shins and wiggles her toes. A gust of breath out through her nose. She’s completely still now, a whirlwind powering down, blinking sleepily and fixedly at the corner of the bed. Phillip can finally look at her properly – after rushing about getting ready for the wedding, and then the endless dancing – he smiles before he heads toward the bathroom.

When he comes back Sara is turned on her side and naked under the covers. “You might get all sweaty again,” she says gravely, which makes Phillip cover his face and laughter bubble out of his mouth. But he unties the towel at his waist.

When he kneels on the bed and leaves a light kiss behind Sara’s ear, there are top notes of orange and pepper that haven’t worn off, latent scents of jasmine and rose. Right, he remembers this; it’s the perfume he bought for her only last Christmas. If it feels like familiar, clean, married-couple-sex, it is not on Sara’s account. She still has spice on her breath and thick contrails of blue eyeliner on her temples, and when Phillip kisses and sucks on her fingertips red henna flowers swim in his vision.

Sara nibbles his jaw and forgets to stop, squeezes her fingers around the back of his thigh and doesn’t let go. Phillip’s knees buckle as she presses a hand on the small of his back and pushes him towards her covered thigh; his breath catches at the clumsy contact. Sara stretches indulgently, lifts her arms over her head and twines them around his neck with a low, purring hum. His brushed teeth are nearly numb from the cold rush of his own breath until Sara slides her warm tongue between their lips.

Her mouth tries to follow him when he turns over to open the bedside drawer. His spine actually cracks loudly, three vertebrae in a row, and Sara falls back onto the pillows laughing in little high-pitched huffs, the kind of laughter that is just as hard to stop as the small fondling motions of her fingers on his skin.

“Hang on, turn off the light while you’re up.” Sara smiles to herself and sits up to fluff the pillow behind her.

In the dark Phillip takes less effort to muffle his own residual laughs, but once he reaches the bed again with the condom on he buries them in the pillow next to his wife’s head.

“Hello, handsome.”

He turns his face towards her ear. “Really?” he asks softly.

Sara's reply comes from low in her throat. “Are you complaining?” She scissors her legs up and down for a few seconds of warmth before rolling half on top of him. She stretches to switch on the bedside lamp and in the first flash of yellow light is already looking into Phillip’s eyes from two inches away. “Hello, handsome,” she says again.

He cups her face and kisses her, and after he has finished kissing and she has finished biting and they are over-heated in the wee hours of a July Sunday morning and Sara has flung the sheets down to cool her flat, damp stomach, and Phillip’s back is aching with uncracked bones, there is blue eyeliner stuck to his thumb.

He lays his head between the curves of her waist, feeling the prickling, shivering skin around her bellybutton slowly warm under his cheek. He can bring up both hands to hold her hips and all of a sudden she feels very petite and very precious.

Sara’s fingers cease their sleepy, comforting strokes through his hair. “Oh _fuck_ , I still haven’t brushed my _teeth_.”

*

Demitri’s engagement band is on his left hand and he won’t stop fiddling with it. It’s meant to come off in an hour. The same ring is meant to go back on immediately after, on the right hand, as a wedding band.

Demitri is round-faced with sunny brown hair like a fawn, and is about as loveable as Bambi, too. Phillip has darker hair, bluer eyes, a sharper voice – and he might be the only one who can scare some sense into his little brother right now.

“And here I thought German weddings were supposed to be fun?” Phillip says dryly, arms crossed as he stands on the other side of the room.

Demitri tsk’s and keeps pacing the same three steps in front of the window. It looks out onto a shady corner of his parents-in-law’s garden, set up with white chairs ready for the morning sun and a cohort of wedding guests.

“You,” step “are,” step “ _the_ worst,” step “best man.”

Phillip rolls his eyes. _Mature rebuttal, Demi_. He picks a garment bag off a chair. “Look, I have been fully dressed for the last ninety minutes. The least the _groom_ can do is put his jacket and tie on. You can’t do too much damage to it in sixty minutes, can you?”

“You’d think being married already would make you a bit more willing to part with your wisdom, Phil. This morning’s your last chance, so any time now.”

Phillip strode up to the window and pinned the garment bag to his younger brother’s chest. “Listen, I married Sara and you are marrying Meredith and there is not a single thing I can tell you that will help. They're two completely different people and I couldn't figure out your future wife if I tried, so I don't have a cheat sheet. What I can tell you is that the relatives won’t suddenly retract their affection and start hating you, the crockery’s been pre-smashed and the reception is going to be _fun_.”

Demitri scrubbed a hand over his face, grimacing. “That’s—that’s practicalities. Technicalities. Small details. I’m—I'm thinking about Meredith. About _being_ married. _Marriage_ , you know?”

Phillip raised his eyebrows. “Come again?”

His little brother sighed. “Just... Give me a simple answer. You and Sara, work, right? It works. You’re... okay. So. Do you think Meredith and I—”

“Will be good together forever?” Phillip turns slightly and brushes his hand over Demitri’s shoulder. “Simple answer, and you can call me out on this later, yes.” He tilts his head at the window. “We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think so. And, well, everyone’s giving it a try, aren’t they?”


	3. 2012

It starts to fall apart when Phillip leaves Dr Sriprakash’s room.

Or rather, ‘it’ coalesces outside and crackles like a storm preparing its grand entrance into the skyline, while Phillip sits in the armchair opposite the not-mandated-but-strongly-recommended therapist.

“In your own time,” she urges.

*

It starts, maybe, he thinks, with being alone with Sergeant Sally Donovan. You know, she had been different when she’d started at New Scotland Yard. Chubbier cheeks and softer smiles, a bit more clumsiness. She made mistakes with phone numbers and had to keep asking where to put things.

The end is beginning when Phillip says, “We’ll go to the Chief Superintendent, then.”

“We’re not going over Greg’s head. That’s, that’s just—No. I’m not doing that.”

Phillip scowls. “If he’s refusing to listen to his sergeant, then what choice do we have? We’re meant to work together, as a _team_ , or not at all.” He leans his body closer to Sally’s, voice low. “Are you going to let the Bruhl kids’ kidnapper walk free? Because I’m sick of it. Holmes can’t keep getting away with this.”

Sally’s jaw is grinding. “And you want me to go behind my DI’s back?”

Phillip sighs and drops his shoulders. “I’m right behind you. Or, I’ll knock on the Superintendent’s door by myself.”

*

Phillip purses his mouth repeatedly against the side of his finger where he has his hand in front of his mouth. Breaths and aborted words skip back and forth over his lip. He’s got his elbow on the thickly-padded arm of the chair, face turned to the window. His index finger strokes up and down his cheek as he stalls, over the dark stubble that’s itching him.

“We didn’t think he’d jump off a _building_.”

“‘We?’”

“Sally and I.”

*

Doctor Sriprakash turns to face Sally’s chair.

“Phillip and I found out at the same time. Our DI got the phone call early in the morning, while we were trying to speak with him, he hung up, I asked him what was wrong.” A slight inhale through her nose. “I tore down the hallway, down to the carpark, Greg heard me swearing like thunder. Got into the car, took off my heels ready to drive. Greg wouldn’t let me, so I let him drive, and we arrived at St. Bart’s Hospital together.”

Doctor Sriprakash inclines her head. “Did you—”

“No, I didn’t see the body,” Sally cuts in.

Doctor Sriprakash turns to face Anderson’s chair.

“I didn’t go with them,” he reminds her.

*

Sara plods into the kitchen at 3am, satin pyjamas hanging away from her legs like limp, peeling tree bark. Her lips are sticky and eyes pinched as she grimaces at the light. “Phil? Haven’t you slept?” Monday night. Thursday and Saturday. On Sunday she stays asleep.

So Dr Sriprakash gives him a speech about the five stages of grieving, even though Sherlock Holmes was the furthest thing from a loved one, and sleeping pills.

*

Phillip’s fingers are gentle on the side of Sally’s face. “I haven’t kissed you in twelve months,” comes out as a weak moan beside her mouth.

Sally’s heeled shoes bring her just slightly taller than him, no more than a centimetre and a half, maybe, but it’s enough to make Phillip zone in on Sally’s lower lip rather than the top one. His cradling hand slips down to her neck while his body undulates towards her. Her heels knock against the wall. The kiss is slow, a moment vibrating on a plucked string, Phillip savouring the softness of Sally’s lips between his own, his eyebrows drawn together with tension.

Sally pushes her shoulders into the wall and her hips into Phillip. Her hands tighten on each of his hips and he is reeled in against her, gasping for breath. A fish out of water indeed.

Sally makes a noise, but it could mean so many things.

Phillip is always aware of his periphery, of the lengths of corridor on either side of them. Sally pulls on his long hair with cold fingers when his eyes dart away and she commands, “Kiss me, don’t stop.”

Twelve months tick down to zero, but it doesn’t leave Phillip’s head, that melodramatic line of _I haven’t kissed you in twelve months, oh god, it was killing me, Sally_. His hair flops into his eyes and their noses bump but Sally has the softest lips he has ever kissed, and his heart is shuddering ready to burst at how much she _wants him_. It’s beautiful—she’s beautiful—he doesn’t need to breathe.

*

Sara’s eyes move between them in such a transparent way. Normally so eloquent, so charismatic, as her job demands and as her friends expect from and know her, Sara speaks haltingly. “I was... I thought I’d come and pick you up this afternoon. Drive you to Dr Sriprakash.”

“We were going to go for a quick coffee,” Phillip replies. “Come with us?”

Sara stares, openly, at Sally Donovan’s face. She smiles shyly and readjusts the handbag on her shoulder, smoothing out the wrinkles on her chocolate-coloured blazer. “Sure, we’ve got time.”

*

Back in their home with the curtains closed and dinner silently and mechanically eaten, Sara hugs herself and shakes uncontrollably. “Oh my God, you didn’t just fuck her—you were in _love_ with—I can’t believe this.” Her voice has never, ever been like this before, rising and towering like a wave in a storm. Quick and sharp like a knife in the dark.

“Oh, my _God_ ,” she screams. “No, you just _shut up_. You do not get to do this to me again. Do you hear me, Phillip? Don’t make me compete with _Sally Donovan_!”

*

On Baker Street, Phillip is anonymous. He has a windbreaker and gloves and just his phone, wallet, keys. He’d taken the Tube and he feels a bit untethered now.

Phillip has recollections of an elderly but sprightly landlady. He doesn’t knock to see if she’s in. There’s a café. He might get a spinach wrap, tear it with his teeth and feel it sit at the bottom of his stomach. He might get a coffee, burn a patch of tastebuds at the front of his guilty tongue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After they present Sherlock with his deerstalker hat and Phillip makes eyes at a smiling Sally, scenes from Greg Lestrade and Sally Donovan's view on the morning of Sherlock's suicide can be read in the previous instalment of the series, 'All My Exits Became U-Turns', scroll down a bunch.


	4. 2013

2013 is a bad year.

Sally’s footsteps are soft when she comes up to him in the break room. “Phillip, are you alright?”

Phillip’s brows draw together gently. “Why wouldn’t I be?” he asks her.

Sally makes a non-committal noise and refills her water bottle, eyes down and hair falling over her cheek. She straightens up and sips at her water while looking carefully at him. “If we’re still friends, then you tell me what’s going wrong so I can help. If we’re not friends anymore, if your wife has said something or other to you, or if you just don’t want to speak to me, or anyone else on the team for that matter, then… fine. You’re on your own until you’re ready to open up and admit to the mistakes we saw this week. I’m not going to keep running headfirst into a brick wall, which you’re doing a good impression of these days.”

Phillip blinks. “First point, it’s nothing to do with Sara, if that’s what you think. Second point, I…”

“Are you going to make it up to Lestrade, yes or no?”

“Look, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the case, alright? I can’t have a bad day or two?”

A frown is growing across Sally’s face and crumpling her skin like paper. “You know you can tell me things,” she says seriously. “You always _tell_ me things, Phillip.”

“I have a therapist,” he replies with a raspy little laugh.

*

There are nightmares about walking around Holmes’s body, blood congealing in the grooves of his rubber-soled shoes, before he wakes with the underarms of his shirt soaked with cold sweat.

St Bartholomew’s Hospital is the oldest standing hospital in London. Commuters walk past the bloodied body on the pavement. A man with a grey suit and messenger bag bumps into Phillip’s arm, muttering, “Unreliable.” A woman’s knee knocks hard into the side of Phillip’s thigh as she tries to step over Holmes’s outstretched arm. “Not at his best, is he?” she calls out over her shoulder.

Voices like whining mosquitos flit past his ears. “ _Phillip_. You’re not fine.” “Distracted.” “Extremely concerning.” His shoes are wet with blood and he’s trying to work, he’s trying to get the lights set up correctly on the scene, he’s trying to work the scene, he’s _trying_ but the people brushing past him are scowling and calling him negligent and he can feel the ankles of his blue coveralls stiffening as the blood dries.

He looks helplessly, breath quickening in panic, down at Holmes’s bright blue eyes catching the light of the sun rising behind the buildings.

“I’m sorry,” he says breathlessly, the words punched out of his lungs by his throbbing heart. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. What do I do now?”

Another man in a suit and coat walks up behind him and stops, hands in pockets, instead of colliding with Phillip’s back. Lestrade’s voice is warm in his ear. “I know what this is. Guilt.”

*

They are “examining his circumstances.”

*

“Be reasonable,” he pleads. “Tell me what I’m doing wrong and I’ll work on it. That’s what we always agreed to do, we said we’d communicate or nothing would ever–”

Sara shoves a hand in front of her and pushes his chest until he's fallen back in the chair. “No, that's not going to work this time, not with me and not with this, Phillip. We _are_ reasonable, we're always logical, that's the reason we're the two most boring people on the planet!”

Sara kneads her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I’d have left you ages ago if I’d had anywhere else to go,” she whispers between her palms. “And I realise this is not a fair time to do it.” Sara uncovers her face and gestures shakily at the nest of newspaper clippings and photographs pinned to the walls next to them. “But I don’t understand what this is anymore. I don’t know the man I’m meant to be supporting, and I don’t know why I’ve been so stupid and waited so long because up until the day he got suspended he could still see the woman he was in love with every day.”

*

Sleeping in the same bed as your soon-to-be ex-wife is... There aren’t words that are quite right. It’s dark. Quiet with the smallest accidental sounds and movements amplified. Shifting to get settled in a bed that used to be shared differently.

Sara wonders if Sally ever lay in the spot beneath her back and hips. She was right, she has nowhere else to go. It is Phillip who will rent, Sara will continue the mortgage on her own, on this large flat of her dreams discovered with her delight and paid for with her gradually growing wealth. She doesn’t know what will happen when she wakes up, how Phillip will look at her when he finds her blearily pouring out muesli in the kitchen, or what she will say before he leaves.

Phillip falls asleep after Sara, final conscious thoughts heavy with the preparation of untying untethering unmarrying himself from this bed.


	5. 2014

Sara sets the bag on the kitchen table and unpacks it with care. One chardonnay, which goes into the pantry. Two tall, heavy bottles of shiraz. There is a glistening _clunk_ on the table from the raspberry vodka. Sara instinctively turns to the second drawer next to the fridge in search of a corkscrew.

"Why isn't it in here?" she asks. Pairs of scissors and vegetable peelers shift underneath her fingers, a wicked silver blade of a mandolin turning and slipping down the pile into darkness.

Phillip opens and closes a cupboard overhead. He holds out his new corkscrew for Sara to take. He's dressed in a cable knit jumper and tracksuit bottoms, has been warm inside his flat for hours, and he moves within a honey-slow haze as he lowers his arm again and watches Sara set the corkscrew to the first bottle of shiraz, elbows spread over the table and flapping as she twists.

*

The television is on but they talk over it. Sara sits with one leg bent under her other thigh, angling her whole body to look diagonally across at Phillip in the other corner of the sofa. “You're growing it out,” she says dryly over her wine glass.

Phillip drinks deeply from his own. He rubs his hand self-consciously under his chin. “Doesn't suit me, does it?”

“Not at all," Sara says, lips quirking. “It's lighter than your hair, takes all the shape out of your jaw, and makes you look a hundred years old. You could be the Ancient Mariner. Or Estragon,” she says with a wave of her hand. Her wry smile widens a touch.

“If Sir Ian McKellen is looking for an understudy soon, you tell me,” Phillip concedes.

Sara swirls her glass after each sip, not quite nervous, but agitated enough. “You're not seeing anyone?”

“Would I be here on New Year's Eve entertaining my ex-wife and her red wine if I were?” But he follows the words with an appreciative swallow, throat working, and soon he is warm enough to undress down to the shirt underneath his jumper, to remove his feet from their slippers and to tuck them underneath Sara's knee.

“Why _am_ I entertaining my ex-wife and her red wine, though? You're not sharing this with a new beau? Or at least your friends?”

Sara shakes her head. “Remember why I married you? I think you were  _it_ , Phillip. Apparently,” she trills, pinky in the air as she tilts her wine glass, over-enunciating, “I am a bit of a bitch. Gets shite done, though.”

*

Her voice is soft, sounding a little rough on the edges, like the first words upon waking on a long Sunday morning. “I sort of… thought it was going to screw you up. Your work,” she admits, slouched in her corner of the sofa. “Looking at dead bodies all the time, mutilations and everything. I thought it was going to fuck you up one day and I'd have to pick up the pieces, but no, no – it was just internet conspiracy theories that did it.”

She says the first part with remorse and the last with a growing sense of cool bewilderment. “You honestly ruined your life for a dead man?”

Phillip gives a half-shrug and raises his glass. “He's not dead,” he says, just as cool.

Sara frowns at him, at the coffee table, at the floor, but her face is pink and soon she closes her eyes for a hot flush to pass. Phillip closes his eyes for a second, too, letting his head fall back onto the sofa, the length of his neck with the bristly brown beard creeping down it moving shallowly with his breath.

*

After the raspberry vodka Sara's voice grows high and breathless. “I'm going—I'm going to _un_ forgive you, that's what.” Sara shifts onto both knees, rearranging her weight over her numb and tingling legs. She rocks forward, hand skidding along the back of the sofa, towards Phillip with eyes wide and shining.

“I take it back,” she breathes fiercely. “You know how I stayed with you, after you slept with her? After you lost your job being an idiot? I stayed—” Sara stares at the glass in her hand in shocked indignation, “I _stayed_ for _months_ but nothing improved, it was all downhill with no going back but Jesus, Phillip…”

Her wobbling weight takes her backwards, bum on her heels. She stutters over the ‘c’, but says, “I cared about you. And I ignored that bullshit you defended yourself with. Well, now, forget it. You  _hurt_  me. You really, honestly did, Phil. And you dragged me down with you and I can’t forget that.”

Phillip has heard words to the same effect before. He learned, early in his marriage, the simple facts: She is right. He is wrong. If he cannot say sorry, he shouldn’t say anything at all. So Phillip raises his wine glass to his ex-wife, with her sad, glassy eyes, because now it’s too late to say anything. The last two years have gone by so quickly and now, here, on this sofa, time feels like it’s standing still.

It’s 11.58pm and Phillip doesn’t know what to do with himself, with the time. It’s 11.58pm and there’s not enough time to tell Sara everything he’s sorry for, everything he understands now. It’s 11.59pm and he cannot get his job back, nor can he fix things with the woman he loves, nor can he fix things with the woman who divorced him.

It’s 11.59pm and the freezing crowd underneath the glowing London Eye is counting down from ten.

It’s 2014.

As if Sara can hear his thoughts, drunkenly sluggish but loud, like a blood-hot shout behind his forehead, her face crumples in sympathy. She turns her face deliberately away from the television and the window up to which real shouts of elation and mindless roars are floating, and her shoulders hunch over and she begins to cry softly.

Five minutes later it has passed and Phillip is swapping her damp tissue for a dry one, while his ex-wife takes another shot of raspberry vodka and wipes her eyes on the back of her hand. He has moved to sit in the middle of the sofa now, dabbing more wadded tissues unhelpfully on her narrow cheeks.

“Can I tell you a story?” he asks quietly. Sara turns red eyes and a downturned mouth towards him, but finds so much tenderness and anxiety warring over Phillip’s face that she exhales hard (warmth rolling over his sensitive lips, air finding the spaces between the hairs of his beard) and acquiesces.

*

“He got away unharmed. Jumped into a passing vehicle, passed unseen. He could be…” Phillip pauses to think, taking a large breath under Sara’s weight on his chest. “It’s been seventeen, eighteen months… He could be on any continent by now.”

“You’re crazy,” comes the yawn. But his talking has done its job; Sara sounds like she’s finally ready to give it up and fall asleep, after her interjecting groans and muffled snorts.

Phillip squeezes his arm around her back briefly. He ought to get out from underneath her and let her rest her head on the arm of the sofa, instead of having her back bent at an angle with the way she’s currently leaning against his chest. But having Sara half-asleep in his arms again is so unimaginably arresting, a feeling so powerful in the way it contracts his heart and makes his throat ache with sweetness, that Phillip is unable to move any one of his limbs.

Half-asleep is not enough to stop Sara from lifting her head. Part of her cascade of black hair is stuck to the front of Phillip’s jumper by static, a number of strands gently stretching away from her face.

Sara licks the stickiness from her lips. Mashes her chin into Phillip’s chest. Her eyes are clearer than they were before; she’s metabolising the alcohol bit by bit. She stares up at Phillip’s face while he nearly touches his own chin to his collarbones and wrinkles his neck trying to look back at her.

“I can’t believe you’re growing a beard,” she mumbles, touching the side of his jaw with the soft pad of her finger. Her eyes blink sleepily.

Sara’s fingers tap against Phillip’s rough jaw before slipping down to the bare skin low on his neck. Phillip bites back a gasp at the familiarity of this intimacy. Everything between his jaw and his shoulder lights up with tingles. He raises his free hand to grasp Sara’s wrist. She feels the shock of his gold ring against her pulse where his fingers curl around her bones, and jumps a little.

“You’re wearing it on the wrong hand,” she says at last.

“You know, the Germans wear it on the right hand,” Phillip says contemplatively. “Other countries, too, I’m sure. But you remember Demitri and Meredith, don’t you?”

“I drank a lot at their wedding,” Sara concedes. Then she looks right in his blue eyes and pulls the collar of his jumper down, to touch the top of his shoulder near his neck. She rubs circles over his warm skin, small as she can, with the very tip of her forefinger.

“No, still can’t believe it,” Sara murmurs huskily. “Whatever happened to my handsome man?”

Phillip’s legs are stiff. His arm is still tight around Sara’s shoulders, stuck between her and the sofa. His head is still tucked downwards to meet her eye, but he closes his when Sara raises her head just that bit more, unfolds her elbows, cups his face in both hands with his beard scratching harshly at her palms, and kisses him.

Phillip’s heart swells and hammers madly against his sternum. This is what he knows, this is what he’s good at. His hands go to Sara’s petite waist and the spots that make her voice go high-pitched. His lips are suffused with heat and his throat aches again. Sara’s warm mouth pushes softly against his, open, but when she moves her tongue between her lips to begin pushing at his she seems to choke on her own tongue or her own breath – she sucks in a surprised breath as she pulls back, face twisted like she has suddenly swallowed whole something sour and rotten.

*

It’s 2.07am and the raspberry vodka is making Sara sick. She runs full tilt into the bathroom and throws up in the toilet bowl. Phillip hears sobs and maybe a moaning howl or two, but very soon Sara is calm. She tickles her gag reflex to hurry things along, trying to get rid of as much of the liquid upsetting her stomach as she can.

She raises her voice. “Phillip, get me some water.” He does, and holds her waves of hair gently in his hands. He passes her water, and a clean towel, and combs her hair until it’s soft and smooth again before she finally goes to bed. It is one she has never seen, and until that point unvisited by both Sara Singh-formerly-Anderson and Sergeant Sally Donovan.

*

Greg Lestrade has a disapproving line between his eyebrows. “Three years ago I was going through the exact same thing you’re going through.” He gulps his pint a little frustratedly. “You’re a cheating bastard and you fucked up, though, let’s just make that clear.”

Phillip leans back and half-shrugs, half-stretches. “You had your work to throw yourself into, to force you through the whole… separation process. If you’ve forgotten, the only place I’ve been thrown is _off the team_.”

Greg twitches his nose at that. “I told you I’m trying to hurry them along with reinstating you. I’m optimistic even if you don’t sound like it.”

Phillip is unmoved, eyes dull. “Yes, well, I’ve heard what people think of me by now. By the way, the last time I saw my ex-wife she was nursing a hangover, not inviting me to my niece-in-law’s birthday party, so it’s hardly fair to compare experiences, is it?”

“Nephew’s birthday,” Greg corrects calmly. His fingers curl around the base of his cold glass.

“I’m not bitter,” Phillip says. “She’s better off without me. I’ve been told as much. Among other things.”

Greg lifts his pint and looks pointedly at the man opposite him. “To being over exes, not being cheating bastards, and getting a bloody grip.”

Phillip rolls his eyes briefly but nevertheless clinks his glass with fervent gusto.

*

Another week. The same pub. A young woman walks by Phillip’s table, where he has a stack of paper in a bulging manila folder by his elbow and a pen in his other hand, leaking over the page of text he’s currently trying to annotate.

“Doctor Wilson?” she chirps before stopping short when Phillip raises his head. “Oh my god, my bad,” the girl apologises, sheepishly pushing her hair behind her ear. “Thought you were my lecturer.” She laughs lightly. “You know, scruffy beard, beige jumper, the professor look. _Are_ you a professor? You look like you’re editing that _pretty_ intensely.” She lifts her index finger away from the side of her pint to point at Phillip’s ink-stained page.

“No,” he drawls. “Wrong on all counts, I'm afraid.” He tries a polite, close-lipped smile.

“Looks interesting, though. Need a sounding board?” She’s already sliding onto the other stool, setting her pint onto the table surface and crossing her arms in front of her. Eagerly leaning forward.

Phillip’s mouth clicks open. “Uhm. Ah. That… depends. I’ve been working on this, god, maybe a year? It’s a tough puzzle.”

“I’m really clever,” the young woman insists.

“Alright.” Phillip straightens his back, plants his fingers on top of the page and swings it around. “Game on.”


	6. After Sherlock, and 2015

_… There was uproar in court as Sherlock Holmes was vindicated and cleared of all suspicion…  
Questions are now being asked as to why police let matters get so far._

* * *

 

The first person he calls is Lestrade, just to confirm. _Yes, yes, yes._ The second person he calls is Sally, babbling, hand gesturing next to his head and covering his brow and tugging through his hair. He regrets that, actually, calling without thinking and knowing she was confused and frustrated at his incoherence on the other end of the phone, but she needed to know.

“He’s alive. We didn’t—we didn’t—I was _right_. Sally, do you realise…”

She agrees to meet him that afternoon. He snatches up his coat and scarf and gloves from his chair and dismisses The Hearse over his shoulder. “I’m sorry, everyone, it’s just—I really need to go see someone.” He falters at the door to the foyer, nodding at their host and owner of the little sitting room they were all clustered in. “Thank you for today, Sam.”

“Off to meet your boyfriend?” Laura calls out from inside the sitting room.

“That man was a Detective Inspector of the Metropolitan Police’s Homicide and Serious Crime Command to you, Laura!” Phillip bites back before hauling open the front door.

*

Phillip drives to New Scotland Yard. Sally walks out of the building and they meet on the curb, under the silver-lettered sign and the cool grey sky. Just beyond arm’s reach apart.

Sally speaks first. “He really did it?”

Phillip’s throat is dry and unsticks painfully when he swallows. His gloved hands hang by his sides. “Didn’t Lestrade tell you? Didn't he tell everyone?”

Sally does not quite laugh, her lips peel back in not quite a smile – there is something brittle and glassy in the way she looks to the side and up to the sky, lifting a hand to push her hair behind her ear absently. The next second, she is leaning over, hands on her thighs just above her kneecaps, supporting her weight as she just looks down at the ground and breathes. The shallowest of laughs again.

“Bloody…” She squeezes her eyes shut as two and a half years are pulled down as false idols. “How in the hell did he do that?”

Phillip stiffens. He is underprepared to tell that part of the story.

*

“All you ever wanted to talk about was Sherlock Holmes. And bungee cords, and rubbish trucks, and air mattresses—”

“That last one was right, apparently.”

“I don’t want to talk about Sherlock Holmes.”

“But you always _did_ talk about him. How much you hated his texts. How bloody annoying he was on scene. Every week some new cruel thing to say about him. And I was implicit in that, I know; it was our way to vent. It was our _thing_. But so much has changed, and we were wrong about him—”

“I was following your lead, you know,” Sally cut in. “Went to the Chief Superintendent with you. Kept up with the news of the investigation that cleared him, because you asked me to. So yes, I _knew_ we were _wrong_ , alright.”

Phillip takes in Sally’s crossed arms, her weight on her legs so that her right foot pointed towards him, her little black shoe in front of her, the expectant, almost accusatory incline of her head. She used to speak to the Freak like that.

“Thank you,” he says softly. “I said I’d stop telling you about,” he waved his fingers vaguely in front of his hip, “the _theories_. But thank you for listening to me about the investigation. It was just so we… we _knew_.”

Sally sighs. “Yeah, I understood that, Phil.”

“And Sherlock’s not dead,” he says in a firmer, brighter voice. “We know that now, too. I don’t know about you, Sally, but that’s a weight off my shoulders.”

Sally finally cracks a smile that’s slightly more real. “How many weeks of therapy did it take to make you say that?”

“Oh, didn’t count. Therapy can go hang,” he replies with a twist of his own mouth. Sally laughs a little louder. “I suppose Sherlock will be coming in to work with you and Lestrade again,” Phillip remarks lightly.

The grin freezes on Sally’s face.

*

He’s holding her shoulders, kissing her prominent lips. He’s dressed in pressed trousers, light blue dress shirt, suit jacket open on either side of his hips, but his beard has only been trimmed. Sally’s shoulder blades move under his palms like waves rising and falling. Her eyes are half-closed, her breath dark plumes against his chin, her forehead pressed to his with her ringlets covering her ears. Sally puts her arms around his neck and pulls him flush against her chest, licking warmly into Phillip’s mouth.

There's a part of him that prayed and pined, hoping this would feel like it did before, with all the passion that had always been there between them. Another part of him, the scientist, the logician, knew surely it could never be repeated exactly. They'd never exactly been together. (Except for a golden set of memories residing in Phillip's brain, a set he calls the honeymoon moments, when things were so precisely perfect that it felt like the two of them actually had a  _relationship_   _–_ it was the memory of watching Sally drink coffee while the sun shone across a polished table, the memory of her with teary eyes and him being ready with open arms, the memory of her crying out beneath him and shaking and squeezing, the memory of her looking at him with tilted head and tangled hair and smiling like she had a great surprise ready. Add these moments of perfection up and you could say Phillip and Sally had been _'together'_ for mere minutes.) They had never really broken up.

“Why do you do this?” How can she bear to still kiss him like this.

_He made her feel good. That’s the beginning and end of it, really. Her mother tells her, “You’ve grown up so beautiful. Why haven’t you met a man yet?” and the answer is that so far she’s too strong for them, she breaks them, and perhaps her mother should have been more concerned with the seed of fear in her young daughter that made her grow into Persephone, a new queen who saw right and wrong so clearly she knows only how to rule this way, to judge and command._

_Phillip says she’s beautiful, too. All her boyfriends had. But she makes love with the same body she uses to make war, the field sullying the bed – and what had that first contact between hands and eyes been but an act of_ war _against the married sovereign? But Phillip uses his whole being, head to toe, to make her happy, to make her feel the best she’s ever felt. There’s no denying the almost electric power trip when his body seizes under her outstretched hands on his chest, as if she’d grabbed exposed wires, and she feels_ good _, feels even better to consume him from above—pinned down—hands up—her mouth_ watering _—it feels so, so good—_

—and Phillip likes the way she makes him feel. He likes to offer things. He takes pleasure from looking at her show her teeth in a wide smile. Her smile. He'd know it anywhere.

He'd wanted Sara to have the world but there was Sally, who was so beautiful and who took everything he was willing to give. Being married didn’t stop him from falling in love with someone else, deeply, unforgivably.

There’s the unaddressed question now, as there was before, of what Sally is to him now that she is not the extra-marital girlfriend. There is the question now, as there was before, of why they are not together now that Sara has been more than a year gone.

It’s a question they had put off with Phillip’s departure from the Forensic Services and withdrawal into his own study immediately after his divorce.

It’s a question Detective Sergeant Sally Donovan cannot answer just with fervent kisses.

*

Everyone is squeezed onto the sofa, looking at the modest television with Phillip’s video camera hooked up to it. They watch Sherlock’s taped explanation of what they all know as The Fall from St Bart’s. On the screen, Sherlock’s cool eyes are directed dispassionately at the lens, right at them.

Samantha is leaning against the arm of the sofa, her arms crossed. She plays hostess for these meetings most times; this is her living room. “Well, what are we meant to do now?”

Everyone else turns to him, hanging back by the wall.

“Have you posted this online?”

“No, I haven’t.” Phillip clicks his tongue. “I might.”

“Do you believe what he said?”

“I was waiting for your opinion.”

Samantha uncrosses her arms and leans over to pat him on the shoulder. “This is it. He’s not just alive, he told you how he did it. That’s… that’s brilliant.”

The youngest member of The Empty Hearse purses her lips and pushes up her glasses. “Sam’s got a point, though,” she says to the room. “After this video, what are we meant to do?” She sticks out her lower lip. “My theory’s busted.”

Fortnightly meetings turn into monthly get-togethers, much more casual, less fraught with frustration and tension. Let them make lunch plans among themselves, Phillip thinks, they’ll be happy not to have to trail after him anymore. They’d agreed with each other more often than they’d agreed with him, after all.

For example, he knows there is a quartet of students who’d met at one meeting and are pretty much joined at the hip by now. After the media storm following Sherlock’s real return, their friends and acquaintances had turned to them for accurate news, for reactions, for explanations.

“I’m in this group, we just looked at the evidence more carefully, that’s all. We had some working theories. Sherlock made the jump from the top of the hospital to the bottom – totally called it. Oh, you know it was started by a guy from the Met Forensic Services, right? He was pretty alright.”

“Hang on, he _was_ a bit bonkers.”

“It was better than working with nothing.”

“So, you were like that episode of _Doctor Who_ where those conspiracy theory people make a club to find the Doctor and everything?”

“Yeah, but we were using physics and shit, not historical photographs and UFO sightings.”

He remembers a young man had joined them at one point. Six weeks after that, a string of vitriolic comments against Sherlock Holmes on John Watson’s blog were all deleted by the user.

And then (and now) there’s Samantha.

*

“Sorry, what was your name again?” Phillip says the first time they are about to part ways.

She starts with, “Sa—” and there his heart just _sinks_ because this is doomed, he’s a goner “—mantha.”

It is barely admirable that he holds off months and months before, in a quiet moment at her door, after he packs his things from the Hearse meeting and before he steps onto her garden path, he turns back to face her and says, “Have dinner with me.”

Samantha’s big hazel eyes just blink, a little comic, mostly adorable, all so _her_. Samantha’s lips are puckered and twitching as she muffles whatever laugh or snort or elongated vowel of confusion her trachea had failed to entirely contain. Her hands are still lightly gripping the doorjamb.

“I like Italian. Or Korean,” she says at last.

Phillip probably thinks he’s nodding in understanding, but in reality he’s frozen and blinking dopily at her.

“I mean, is that alright with you?” Samantha prompts. She is a twitch away from an amused, sidelong wink. “Or,” she tries, “there’s a great Thai place two streets away, their delivery is really good. Always gives me a bag of prawn crackers and a Coke.”

Phillip finally finds the strength for a smile. “Oh, that’s nice of them.”

“Mm-hmm,” Samantha agrees. She pulls her phone from her jeans pocket to check the time. “And they open for dinner in forty-five minutes.”

*

Arjun is in The Chair. Phillip's just about to tell him off for slacking when feet pound up the stairs and burst through into the kitchen.

Sherlock moves, alive, irascible, as the night Phillip was last in 221B, finding the pink suitcase _in the hands of our favourite psychopath…!_

It's like watching some chaotic play from close up, the Holmes brothers darting and gliding over the floor of the flat. Though he has to admit, Sherlock looks worse than he'd imagined when he'd got a call asking to conduct a search for drugs. Addiction by no means leads to a clean or pretty sight, but the only Sherlock Holmes he has ever known is slim, clean-shaven, well-dressed and stands tall. Phillip's stomach turns a bit, and the mix of concern and wariness that bubbles up is automatic, because this Sherlock hunches and stomps and his distinctive features are unrecognisable under dirt and tangles and stubble. Even his eyes seem to have changed, looking greener and darker than their usual blue clarity.

He hasn't actually got anything to say to Phillip. He's just glaring.

“Oh, that’s him, isn’t it?” Samantha breathes. All of a sudden she has a smile that’s acting independently from her brain, but it’s in her eyes as well and Phillip can’t help one side of his own mouth curling up for a split second. “You said he’d be taller.”

Sam's easy to please, honestly she is, but she's cheeky.

*

Samantha laughs more than you’d expect from your first glance of her.

Sara is the ex-wife he’d been devoted to as a twenty year old young man at Cambridge with pale, skinny arms and bright eyes and floppy hair. They were meant to take on the world together. Sally is something unnameable, the lengths of his infatuation unforgivable and he fears, he fears, unstoppable. (The man he became over the past three years was enough to stop her, it was enough to stop her, she knows, she knows, he was never good enough to deserve her and he’s not worth it anymore.)

With his track record, Phillip doesn’t know if what he has with Samantha is permanent. Marriage was meant to be permanent. He doesn't look at Samantha and see ‘this is the rest of our lives’. But Phillip sees the next day, and the day later that week when they’re meant to get dinner together, and the weekend they’re meant to stay home and watch Heston Blumenthal. And there’s no question Samantha has had enough of waiting. She throws herself onto the sofa without self-consciousness, she flings her upper body over the back of the sofa and over his shoulder and down for kisses she will just  _leave_  on his face before flipping herself away.

Phillip has never fit himself around the particular shape she leaves; he is unfamiliar with the spaces her personality carves out for him. He is neither in his twenties nor his thirties. Samantha does not dress the same way as Sara or Sally. She is looser, she spreads herself open, she embraces.

She has stopped caring about what the world sees fit to throw at her. She laughs at her ridiculous boyfriend-man-child, and the sound fills the house.

*

“Leinster Gardens. That’s his number one bolt hole. It’s top, top secret,” Phillip proclaims confidently. He remembers it clearly: a row of pristine white houses, a silhouette he could never forget, the moment Phillip had stopped, breath hitching, hands still by his sides. The genius of it, those two untouched façades, and Sherlock's springing steps, hair bouncing by his ears, coat whirling around his knees. In his element again, crown prince of London's mysteries and secrets.

Samantha jerks her head in his direction. “He only knows about it ’cause he stalked him one night.” She gives a conspiratorial roll of the eyes at the blonde woman opposite them.

“ _Followed_.”

“Followed, yeah.” Samantha tightens her shoulders and smiles a little manically. “So, how was the honeymoon?”

Mary Watson raises an eyebrow. “What are you expecting me to say?”

“We read on the blog – you came back recently, didn’t you? Was it nice? See some sights, relaxed enough for one year?” Comforting, tame, womanly chatter – which Mary Watson ignores before raising her hand to say she was leaving and goodbye.

“Don’t know what they see in her,” Phillip mutters as he places his arm around Samantha’s waist.

She shrugs, leaning into him and starting to walk back to the car. “Must be having an off day, you never know. Pregnancy hormones are capricious buggers, you’ll do well to remember.” Samantha yawns loudly, eyes scrunching shut. “God, why am I always so sleepy after dinner?” she laughs.

Phillip chuckles and pulls her closer, feeling her round cheek crash into his shoulder before Samantha starts nuzzling her face into his shirt. He's used to her ways, by now, and they're incredibly fond of each other. But no. He'll wait a few more months.

*

“Phil, is this going to take long? Brr, it’s freezing out.” Their shoes are covered in half-melted snowflakes as they walk through Chinatown after dinner. Fresh snowflakes are falling fast onto their hats.

Phillip squeezes her hand. “It’s alright. Just... bear with me.” He stops under a streetlamp, turning to face her with a firm exhalation and a click of heels. He holds both of her hands, hanging loosely below their waists.

“Well. Sam.” He'd better say the rest quickly before he starts stammering. He clears his throat. “It’s not Christmas morning, and I was thinking I’d be original but closer to the time I don’t think it’s all that original actually, but never mind. Here is your gift which has nothing to do with Christmas.”

Phillip presses a ring into Samantha's palm while she's still staring with bewilderment into his eyes.

Samantha's eyes widen when she feels the shape of it through her glove. Her mouth pops open. “Oh,” she mumbles.

She tears off her left glove, clumsily fitting the silver ring over the correct finger with her other gloved hand. “Christ!” she yelps. “It's _cold!_ Jesus, the ring is freezing, my hand is freezing—  _Phil!”_

Phillip can't help but break apart into a laugh, the huff of breath misting in the air. He puts his arms around Samantha's shoulders and rubs briskly. It quickly turns into an embrace of relief and affection as well as for warmth. “Yeah, yeah, alright. Quick, let’s get a cab.”


End file.
